Center for Citizen Media

NY Times: Conrad Black’s Downfall Shaped by Many Battles. Another striking aspect of Mr. Black’s downfall is the degree to which his own bullheadedness has worked against him. Mr. Black, a military history buff who would compare his business strategies to great battles, made several aggressive moves after being removed from his company that resulted in more lawsuits and investigations into his affairs.

This guy has been bad news for years. But his arrogance probably had as much to do with his problems as his actual business dealings. Let’s hope he’s out of journalism for good.

And the next time someone starts ranting about lousy blogger ethics, remind them of Conrad Black.

I’m heading to Austin today for the New Agendas in Journalism and Citizenship symposium at the University of Texas School of Journalism. My topic for a talk tomorrow night: “Media Literacy in a Media-Saturated Age.”

In country after country, people are trying fascinating experiments in citizen media. One of the pleasures of visiting other places is learning about some of them.

At a conference where I spoke today in El Escorial, a town northwest of Madrid, I learned about Bottup, a citizen journalism site that, from the sound of it, is doing all the right things. The site, which runs on the open-source Joomla content management software, has a clean look and feel. I don’t know nearly enough Spanish to weigh the overall journalistic quality of the articles, but as founder Pau Llop explained things, there’s plenty to recommend it.

He described an editorial process that includes training for citizen journalists and serious work with the contributors and their articles. This is the kind of due diligence that will in the end make for better journalism.

Llop and his colleagues — and their contributors — have been doing this as a labor of love, so far. Site visits haven’t been huge, and revenues essentially nonexistent. (He joked today that he’s lost five kilos in the past few months.)

They want to pay their contributors, but will need to build a business. I hope they succeed. We need more of this kind of thing, everywhere.

I’m also impressed with the Periodismo Ciudadano site that is aggregating all kinds of citizen-media ideas and coverage for the Spanish-speaking world. Some great ideas there, though the tag cloud at the top is almost too big; it tends to obscure the other material more than it probably should.

Separately, Javier Pedreira, co-author of the extremely popular Spanish group blog Microsiervos, was at my talk today Here’s his blog posting about it.

I’m doing an online chat today at ELPAIS.com, the website of the big Spanish daily newspaper. Readers will be sending questions and I’ll be answering them (via a translator). The chat takes place at 11 a.m. local time.

Backfence.com, a pioneering hyperlocal media company, is shutting down. Terry Heaton, pulling together Web commentary on what he calls some important lessons, says:

The announced closing of Backfence has brought about some refreshing and much-needed discussion on the subject of hyperlocal news and the web. This is an important discussion, because a lot of companies are looking to hyperlocal as the salvation of their business model. But the concept is misunderstood and, as a result, carries a false promise for mainstream media.

As many of you know, Backfence purchased my Bayosphere site about 15 months ago. I became a shareholder and, for a time, a consultant to the company and part-time blogger.

Which is why I can’t say much about this, even though I’ve known about it for some time. I had some confidential conversations with the Backfence principals during the past year and a half. I won’t violate those confidences. Sometime in the relatively near future, I hope to post something about how I believe hyperlocal journalism can work best in a rapidly changing media environment.

Don’t imagine that Backfence’s demise is anything terribly tragic. It’s unfortunate, yes, particularly for the founders who put so much time and effort into the project (and somewhat less so for the investors), but let’s reserve seriously painful thoughts for events that deserve them.

Most startups fail. That is not a bad thing. It is a necessary thing, because a tolerance for risk — no, a need to embrace it — is at the core of how good things eventually come from experimentation. It’s a vital part of how we learn, and improve.

David Weinberger: Delaminate the Bastards!. We should do to the carriers of Internet signals what we did to the carriers of telephone signals. Bust ’em up so that the companies that connect us to the Internet don’t also sell us services over the Internet. Providing connection and providing content and services can and should be profitable businesses. They just shouldn’t be the same business…just as you wouldn’t want your local school owned by The Acme Textbook Company, or your safety inspectors supplied by The Acme Burglar Alarm Company. It’s just too hard to resist your own brand.

The map at left comes courtesy of the Cato Institute, where Radley Balko has been looking into the increasing number of botched paramilitary-style police raids on private citizens. This presentation starkly shows how common this kind of thing has become — and, as Balko has testified before Congress, this data may only be the tip of the iceberg.

What’s striking about the project in addition to the reporting he’s done, is how ideally the map works as a display. He and his colleagues have found the right way to help tell this story.

What’s also striking is that a partisan think tank has done the work that journalists should have been doing. This is journalism, too — advocacy journalism but the real thing nonetheless. Kudos to Cato.

(Thanks to Sean Gilligan for the heads-up.)

LA Times: Mayor’s girlfriend is placed on leave. Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo placed newscaster Mirthala Salinas on paid leave Thursday while it carries out an investigation into whether she breached journalistic ethics by having a relationship with someone she covered: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Jack Shafer (Slate): After the staff cuts, will the newspapers of the future look like the newspapers from the past?

Our country, right and wrong.